The Winning Attitude

What is attitude? Your attitude is an outward feeling expressed by behavior. That’s why your attitude shows without you saying a word. Your actions become a window to your soul. The person who gives a “look that could kill” is not inwardly singing “Oh happy day.” Has anyone ever told you you have a bad attitude? Parents, teachers, and employers sling that phrase around like salt and pepper.  

What does it mean to have a “bad attitude”? It means that you’re too negative, it means that you’re too critical it means that you are argumentative, that you’re sarcastic, that you’re too arrogant that you act like a junkyard dog half-starved.  

It means that you choose to disagree when it’s easy to agree, it means you whine and pout when you can’t get your way. It means that you’re a monster when people fail to agree with you. You live with your lower lip stuck out most of the time and a chip on your shoulder. You can’t keep friends, you can’t keep a job and you can’t keep a spouse because of your attitude. You are a joyless toad. Some people make you glad when they come and other people make you glad when they leave. Folks with a bad attitude are in that last group. 

Welcome to The Winning Attitude! 

Succeeding in life has a lot to do with attitude. “As a man thinketh, so is he”. You and you alone are responsible for your attitude. The winning attitude is a choice. You are happy because you choose to be happy. You are angry because you choose to be angry. Some people get high on anger and say “It’s just my personality, that’s just the way I am”  

Is someone always raining on your parade? Do you feel like if you inherited General Motors someone would outlaw cars? Don’t feel like that because this is the greatest day of your life. If you woke up this morning and did not read your name in the obituary column, look up and rejoice by choice!  

During the dark days of the Second World War, a Jewish doctor was captured by the Nazis and taken to a concentration camp. His family was killed, they took all of his clothes and gave him camp clothes, they cut his hair off, they took his ring, they took his name and gave him a number. Standing naked with nothing in this world, he said “I recognize that the last great power a man has on this earth is the power to choose the attitude with which he will react to his environment,” and he said, “I made up my mind that the Nazis were not going to mentally defeat me and even though they captured my body, they could not capture my spirit.” 

It’s not what’s done to you, it’s how you react to what’s done to you that makes you like a thing of beauty or a thing of bitterness. You can either get better or you can get bitter and that’s your choice. There are only two choices when it comes to attitude – a good one or a bad one.

A winning attitude or a loser’s attitude.

Two men looked out through prison bars. One saw mud, the other saw stars. The point? Two men in the same situation, but had exactly opposite reactions.  

There was a newspaper story of two young men who were jilted in romance. One of them jumped off a bridge and drowned himself. That was his choice, that’s the loser’s choice. The other wrote a song about his experience and received a $100,000 royalty for the song and friends, with $100,000, you can forget anybody!! That’s the winner’s attitude.  

The most significant decision you can make on a day to day basis is your choice of your attitude. It’s more important than your past, your education, your financial ability, your success or your failure, your fame or your pain, what other people think of you or say of you, your circumstances or your position. Attitude is that fire in your bones that keeps you going or cripples your progress. When your attitude is right, there is no barrier too high, no valley too deep, no dream to extreme, no talents too great.  

Most of us spend most of our time whining over “spilled milk items” the things in life you can’t change. Rather than giving your attention to the most important assignment of every morning, you start to think of the things you can’t change and you start to become bitter and disappointed and instead, you think of the things that destroy your peace. There’s a grand array of them, things that destroy your energy and produce a demoralized and ineffective person.  

Some people are destroyed by the weather, the temperature, the wind, some people go into depression when it rains. Our attitudes are also affected by the cost of living, taxes, the IRS, April 15, say it and most people’s blood pressure skyrockets. Our attitudes are affected by job irritations, the people we work with, our creative energy is destroyed and we become non-productive. The greatest waste of energy is the energy people waste fighting the inevitables of life. Crying over spilled milk issues that cannot be changed. When you fight the inevitables of life, those spilled milk items, you grow ulcers, you get twisted, you become negative, you become hateful and resentful.  

Some people actually die, because of their inability to choose the winning attitude. You cannot change past events, failures and shortcomings so forget those things which are behind and press forward to your prize. Your past is over, forget it, press on! 

There are better things in store for you!!  

When some people are criticized, it just turns their wagons over. Why? Remember, crows only pick at the best fruit! You can avoid criticism by saying nothing, by doing nothing, and by being nothing. But the moment you stand up and speak up, someone will resist you because when you stand for something, someone will stand against that something. So quit living the life of a wallflower and be all you can be.  

An Army medical officer cites an example of death because of “attitudinal failure” in an article in the New York magazine. This tragic true story is told as follows.

Among the prisoners in a POW camp was a tough young marine, 24 years old who had already survived 2 years of living hell as a POW in relatively good health. The reason for this was that the camp commander promised to release him if he would cooperate. Since others like him had been released before, the young man could safely anticipate his release. The marine turned into a model POW and as time passed he gradually realized that his captors had lied to him and they had no intentions of releasing him. When the full realization of this took hold, he became a zombie, he refused to do his work, he rejected all offers of food and encouragement, he simply laid down on his cot, rolled into a fetal position, started sucking his thumb and in a matter of days, he died. Caught in the vise grip of lost hope, life became too much for a once tough marine to handle. When he surrendered to despair and depression, there was nothing left to do but lay down and die. Your attitude and your thoughts in life can kill you. As a man thinketh so is he. 

Discouragement is contagious.

There is a story about a fellow who was about to jump from a bridge and an alert police officer saw him and he walked slowly and methodically toward him talking to him all the time and he said “Sir, there’s no reason for you to want to jump off this bridge and kill yourself!” The man turned around and said, “But you don’t understand. My wife has left me, my business has gone broke, the IRS has repossessed my house!”  After 30 minutes of that discouraging talk, both of them jumped!

It’s contagious. Hope is strangled by discouragement, joy is poisoned by the cyanide of discouragement. Dreams die, because discouragement is a cancer that devours your dreams. Choose the winning attitude. If you don’t think you can, you can’t!! 

When do you choose your attitude? As soon as you wake up. Your attitude is your choice. Choose it early before things have a chance to go wrong. Your attitude determines your destiny, you are responsible for your attitude. So for the benefit of your family and the people you work with, for your personal and spiritual development, choose a winning attitude, early. 

Poor self image.

Have you ever noticed how people with a poor attitude have a poor self image?  That’s always true. One day a boy came home from school and he said “Dad, I think I’ve flunked my math test.”  And the father said “Son, don’t say that, that’s negative, be positive”  The boy said “OK Dad.  I’m positive I failed my math test.”   

People who have a poor attitude act like a poisoned bulldog. They gripe they nag, they complain, they murmur, they constantly criticize, because they are so insecure about who they are. You say to them, “Have a good day” and they say “Why only one good day?” You can never say anything right to them, because they are messed up inside.  

People who have a poor attitude have no confidence, they are afraid to make decisions, but when they make one, it’s the wrong one. They blame other people for everything, they can never make a mistake, and they must be right all the time about everything.

They have a bully personality because they are scared to death. They try to intimidate other people and control other people because that’s the only way they know to exist in life. When someone criticizes you unjustly, what they are really saying is, “I feel rotten inside, I don’t like the real me, so I’m going to criticize you and I’ll criticize everything that moves, because if I stop criticizing you, you’re gonna start looking at me and you might discover what a shell of a person I am and how shallow I am and how totally insecure I am, and when you discover who I really am, you really won’t like me at all, so I’m gonna keep up this bulldog act until I get my way” that’s what they’re saying. 

The question is not what has been done to you, but how you react to what has been done to you. 

Which of these next four songs reveals your attitude in life? 

1. MAKE THE WORLD GO AWAY
2. RAINDROPS KEEP FALLING ON MY HEAD
3. I DID IT MY WAY
4. OH, WHAT A BEAUTIFUL MORNING

Which of those songs are you singing? Attitudes do not have to be permanent. If you have a bad one, choose a good one and you can change today and today can be a day of new beginnings. Circumstances do not determine your attitude, you do.  

Franklin D. Roosevelt became President in a wheelchair. Glen Cunningham burned over 90% of his body in a schoolhouse fire who was told by his doctor, that he would never walk again. Not only did he walk again, but he fought back with a winning attitude and became a world champion. One young lady had a skiing accident that left her a quadriplegic, yet she did not retreat from life. She did not roll up in a ball, get in a fetal position and suck her thumb and die. She now paints beautiful works of art, holding a brush in her teeth. THAT’s the winning attitude. If she can go through life being handicapped, and still maintain a bright, positive attitude, what’s your excuse??? 

Bob Hope, in a special show that he was presenting a while back, said there were two servicemen sitting in a wheelchair in the front row side by side. One of them had a left arm and the other one had a right arm and they sat side by side and when Bob Hope said something that was funny, one would furnish the left arm and the other would furnish the right arm and they would clap across their wheelchairs even though they were in miserable circumstances, they chose to be happy. We are all angels with one wing and we need each other to fly. 

Most people wait for the circumstances to change before they change their attitude.

That’s exactly backward. When you change your attitude, it doesn’t make any difference what the circumstances are. Look at the people around you who change things because they want the circumstances to change. They change jobs. If you quit your job, the new job that you have, that boss will want you to come to work, look alive, and work hard until 5:30.  Everybody who is looking for employment is not necessarily looking for work.

People quit business ventures, people quit churches because they are looking for the perfect business, looking for the perfect church. If you find the perfect church, don’t join it, you’ll ruin it.

People quit marriages, because they are waiting for the circumstances in the marriage to change. Let me tell you something. If you divorce who you’re married to, the next klutz you marry will have a bag full of problems. I promise you that.

To all of you single people, when you date anybody for 3 hours on Saturday night, they can be wonderful. The real person is home in a cage with a lock on it waiting to get out!

We quit college. If you quit one college and go to another one, there will be professors there that give exams just like the last one. A student went to his professor and said “I don’t think I deserve this F in English” The professor said, “I don’t think you deserve it either, but unfortunately, that’s as low as we grade around here!!”  

Your attitude toward other people determines their attitude toward you. Until you walk in another person’s shoes and see life as they see it, you will be like the man who angrily jumped out of his car after the collision with another car and shouted “Why don’t you people watch where you’re going? You’re the fourth person I’ve hit today!”  

Are you in business?

Your attitude towards your customers is going to determine whether you succeed or fail. Research has discovered the six major reasons why people quit going to business establishments.

• 1% die
• 3% move away
• 5% have friendships with other business owners
• 9% someone else beats the price
• 15% have product dissatisfaction
• 68% quit because of an attitude of indifference toward them by some employees

68% of your business goes out the door because of an attitude problem of your employees.

Teddy Roosevelt said the most important single ingredient to the formula of success is knowing how to get along with people. John D. Rockefeller said “I will pay more to a man for the ability to get along with people than any other ability under the sun, because the ability to get along with other people is greater than his knowledge” Jesus Christ said, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Your attitude toward other people determines their attitude toward you and if you’re going through life acting like a poisoned bulldog, don’t expect to have a lot of friends and it’s your fault. 

A housewife forgot it was garbage pickup day. And as the garbage truck was coming down the street she ran out the door with a garbage can in her hand. Her hair was full of rollers, the bathrobe had a pin in the middle and was flopping in the wind. She had no makeup on, false teeth were in the house and the wig was not on and she was shouting to the man on the back of the truck “Do you have room?” He said, “Sure, jump on lady, we’ve got plenty of room!” 

Your attitude toward other people determines your professional attainments.

Success demands a winning attitude. Years ago in Kentucky, a man had a very successful restaurant. There was a problem. A new highway was built taking all of the traffic around his place of business rather than bringing it through. What had been a goldmine dried up overnight. But with a winning attitude, he put his pressure cooker in the back of his old Buick and started traveling across America showing people how to cook his chicken. His product caught on. He franchised it and you know it as Kentucky Fried Chicken. The man is Colonel Sanders and a winning attitude made him a very wealthy man. He could have stayed by that little restaurant by the side of the road and said “Nobody ever comes here anymore, it’s the government’s fault.” Instead, he got up took his knowledge, took his attitude and his product, and made millions with it. It was his choice. 

A waitress in New Orleans, a single mother with several children to support, knew that she could not make ends meet, much less wave at each other, as a waitress. She wanted to start her own restaurant and people said “Don’t even try it, it’s over your head.” She ignored their discouraging words, mortgaged her home, and bought a steakhouse in New Orleans. She worked hard. With her winning attitude, she produced a superior steak, she franchised her restaurant all over America and you know it as Ruth Chris Steakhouse. Started by a woman who was told “don’t try” but who did try and made the absolute best of it. Have you ever noticed that genuine top executives like people. They didn’t like people when they got to the top, they liked people when they were at the bottom, and that’s what got them to the top. The job never makes a man, it’s the man who makes the job. You can put a little man in a big position and he is still a little man. Position means nothing. It’s your attitude that means everything. 

A boy came home with dog #5 and his mother said, “That’s too many dogs, you’re gonna sell that one!” The next morning, he stood on the corner with his dog, a little sign on a card “DOG FOR SALE.” Nobody stopped. A supersalesman saw the boy and got out of his car and said “Look boy, if you want to sell that dog, you need to change your attitude about that dog.” So the next day the supersalesman passed that corner and the little boy stood there with his dog all fluffed up, a nice red ribbon around his neck, a sign 4’x8′ on plywood “WORLD CHAMPION DOG, $5,000” That afternoon he came back and scratched in Crayola on that sign was ‘SOLD.’ The supersalesman went to the boy’s house and said “Did you sell that dog for $5,000?” The boy said, “No, I made a better deal. It traded him for two $2,500 cats.”

That’s a winning attitude.